Democracy without rest

Democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Its various qualifications – as liberal, social, procedural, radical, deliberative and so on – suggest versions of a ‘proper’ connection (representation or ‘fit’) between the demo- (the people) and -cracy (the state), but they in no way distance themselves from, or void, the sense of democracy as the sovereignty of the people.

Whether these qualifications indicate a wish for a revival of popular sovereignty against executive power or state violence that, not at all paradoxically, occur in the process of substantiating what is said to be proper to (the properties and property of) this mystical figure of the people and, in so doing, executing its sovereign right to war, or whether they seek an emphasis on an apparent neutrality of the figure of the citizen, who ostensibly requires no identification while nevertheless requiring determinate borders, what remains in play – even if only as affective leverage – is this assertion of the sovereignty of the people. If democracy pitted itself against aristocracy, theocracy and absolutism, it did so by deifying, elevating and absolutising the figure of the people.

I’ve discussed some of this at length elsewhere – also in a post here on Tocqueville et al just prior to this symposium, and in various scattered notes, so I won’t bore myself by going over it again.

I would, however, like to pick up on an assumption, as well as a couple of related threads in this discussion. Over at Posthegemony, Jon wondered, as have others, whether we should abandon the terrain of democracy to the enemy, as it were. I’ll hazard that Jon and I agree more or less on who or what this enemy is, and that some aspect of this has something to do with capitalism. The other thread of the conversations around democracy, and related to this, that I’d like to pick up were noted by CR, that is, an anxiety around “climbing and falling”.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville remarks that the equality which characterises democracy opens “the door to universal competition”, a perpetual restlessness which “harasses and wearies the mind”.

And how does this perpetual restlessness ‘resolve’ itself, or at least seek a repose within the terms of democracy, through an expression of the sovereignty of the people? Zizek will have occasion to define fascism as the attempt to abolish the antagonistic character of capitalism without abolishing capitalism as such. In “Working Through Working,” Werner Hamacher writes:

The conjuring of the “collective and harmonious work of all,” in which society should understand and take hold of itself and the people should once again become properly a people, is directed, domestically, ideologically, and politically, against the class-war politics of the trade unions. And Hitler, psychopompous, makes no secret of this. “The people,” he says, interpreting their “unconscious,” “the people feel, unconsciously, in their interior [!], that those ceremonies of the Marxist kind were at variance with the dawning spring. They did not want hate; they did not want struggle: they wanted to rise!” ( HRP, 261). Yet in Hitler’s address (and in others by him as well), this rising – “Erhebung” here connotes “erection” more than “insurrection” – in which the self-presentation, self-production, and self-positing of the people are accomplished through work, bears resemblance to a curious Christian theologeme: the idea of the “resurrection of our people” ( “Auferstehung unseres Volkes” [HRP, 261]).  [more]

Hamacher’s essay speaks to something of the ressentiment that Carlos wrote of, as well as the politics of energia (or perhaps it should be: ergogracy) that John touched on, and the coincidence of the political and economic that Eric discussed.   It also turns around the question of a foundational cut and limit-point that was inaugurated by democracy, and that democracy is - as Brett argues it, the distinction between populations and the people, demography and democracy.

But Hamacher’s essay also reminds us that the this distinction between the figures of man and that of the citizen that was inaugurated in 1789 is also, in another sense, the distinction between, on the one hand, a body capable of suffering and, perhaps, of evincing sentiment (or a machine which labours) and, on the other hand, a proprietor of self (a bearer of rights, including over one’s self).

I do not think this is a politics worth defending, rescuing or desiring. And, while it may well seem difficult to imagine a non- or a-democratic politics, given how thoroughly democracy has saturated the political horizon - or, less metaphysically put, has shaped politics as geopolitics - in the previous two centuries, I doubt that this problem of imagination is not, instead, the problem of how politics (the political imaginary and its subjectivities) is construed, imagined, defined and, most importantly of all, bounded.

Which is also to say, I very much doubt that no one has an experience of making decisions, of relating to others (or not) – or, in Nancean terms, the decision to tie or (k)not – that escapes a democratic register, no matter the extent of this exhaustion of a certain political imaginary, which is also democracy’s imaginary. To put it otherwise: I do not think the question is whether we might imagine a politics that is not democratic. The question, perhaps, is whether this ‘we’ has a sovereign demeanour that (wants to) identify its self as popular. That might be a more difficult question.

(xposted)